For every picture I take or project I share, there are plenty of others that don’t go to plan, that don’t come together for one reason or another. I wrote about that a bit here. This month I’m sharing another account of a project that failed, because it happened around this time, and I kept notes afterwards. This brief snapshot is about failures of the body, too, and failed expectations; the ways that photography can put you in contact with life, as well as the ways that this contact is frustrated and obstructed by all kinds of things.

In the deep autumn, a few years ago, I went to Lewes to photograph the Bonfire Night celebrations. Bonfire — as they call it in Lewes — is a huge, Carnivalesque event. Preparations begin a year in advance. The whole town gathers together in costumes and parades, divided into Bonfire Societies, carrying torches through the street, and eventually congregating at not just one but several enormous, towering bonfires spread throughout the town, some rumoured to be quite wild, dangerous, and each with their own display of fireworks. I’ve spent the past few years making work about contemporary rituals in Britain, and this famous, town-wide event was one I’d always been especially curious about, long imagining photographing it.

As it happened in the end, I didn’t see any of the fires. I wouldn’t make it to the main event I’d planned for, weeks in advance, booking a room to stay in with several months’ notice (the town fills up completely for the celebrations, and closes to traffic on the day itself).

I drove down from London on the fourth of November, a Saturday. The place had a crackle in the air, the feeling of something coming, palpable even through the misted windscreen of my car. I parked near the lido and walked to the house I was staying in, which was cosy, a fire chattering in the living room and dim light coming through the glass roof above the kitchen. The woman who owned the house was in training to become a death doula, and her kitchen table was covered in information about the end-of-life pathway. Upstairs, the little bed in the spare room was entirely concave, soft and deep, sloping down into a generous cavern in the middle of the mattress. It was also on wheels, easily mobile, sliding fast away from the wall when I tried to lean against it to read.

These were the early days of a period of illness that would go on to last eight months. That night was one of the first times that I acknowledged that I was ill at all. I haven’t yet tried to write about it, and now that I do I’m finding it difficult — I can’t find the words without reaching for cliché, and because in fact that time has almost disappeared from memory entirely, as though I wasn’t forming anything lasting, sensations and events sliding past at such a distance from me as to make no impression at all. But the fact remains: that night, I was too unwell to leave the house, try as I might. Over the first half of the day my legs had stopped working. It began — I was becoming familiar with the pattern — with a deceleration, an increasing heaviness, which culminated in the sensation that, from the waist down, I had become inanimate, and that I may as well be trying to use telekinesis to move something dense and dead. The legs slowed down further and further. The effort cost me more and more. The clouds gathered and glowered until, cracking, they opened and the rain poured down.

And so before the fires were even lit, I was back in my rented room, in the sunken centre of the bed, listening to the first early fireworks and the rain. I went to the death doula’s bookshelf and brought a Mary Oliver collection into the pit I’d made for myself, read it instead of taking all the photographs I’d imagined taking. I want every poem to “rest” in intensity, she wrote. I want it to be rich with “pictures of the world”.

After resting for a long time — I’d begun to learn about pacing — I coaxed myself out of the house, determined to see some of the parade, stepping slow and deliberate. I stood in the cold and the rain while the different Bonfire Societies mustered and the torches were lit. I lifted my camera underneath my umbrella and watched the crowd lining the street, silhouettes looking down from every window. I saw the people of Lewes in their costumes as they began to walk, banging their drums and ringing their bells, the tang of paraffin everywhere. I wiped my lenses with tissue I’d bought from a kebab shop for a pound.

Suddenly a photographer I know was there beside me, unexpectedly, and she looked so alive, the downpour slicking strands of hair against her face, her face which was glittering with the rain and the light from the flames. She was with friends, told me which fire they were going to. I lied and said I’d see her later. I knew I wouldn’t — my legs would barely let me move. I bought a hot chocolate and drank it slowly, hoping to force enough energy into myself to make it the five or ten minute walk home. And then I set out, taking my heavy, impossible steps one by one until I made it, soaking, back to the death doula’s house. I got into bed and returned to the poems. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Later I stood at the window and made videos of the fireworks on my phone. Afterwards, in bed again, I watched the images stream towards me in slow motion, seeing the light shatter into points on the screen, the bedroom floor still revealed at intervals by the shattering light outside. The house shook with each burst. The booming and shaking lasted for hours. The fires burned on elsewhere, or maybe they did — I never saw them. I was warm in my pit. All around me the burnt smell of the radiator coming on.